


Zinc Man

by Selena



Category: The Americans (TV 2013)
Genre: Afghanistan, Case Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-15
Updated: 2015-12-15
Packaged: 2018-05-06 21:31:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 6,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5431502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selena/pseuds/Selena
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elizabeth and Philip are charged with tracking down a young soldier from Afghanistan who has gone rogue. But what will they find?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [objectiveheartmuscle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/objectiveheartmuscle/gifts).



> **Disclaimer** : Characters and situations owned by Joe Weisberg and FX. 
> 
> **Timeline** : set in mid-season 3. Spoilers until that point. 
> 
> **Thanks to** : my valiant beta-reader, Likeadeuce.
> 
>  **Warnings** : Violent acts (lethally and otherwise) discussed; actual "on page" violence on a level with the show. 
> 
> **Author's note** : All Afghanistan-related material based on _Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War_ by Svetlana Alexievich; any mistakes are my own.

**_Prologue_ **

“Blood changes its colors, have you noticed that?” the young voice asked. Philip had the man’s location by now, and he knew that Elizabeth was covering his dead spot, but he still hesitated. It couldn’t be that simple. There had to be a catch.

“In field hospitals, it looks red, all right, but in dry sand it looks grey, and on rocks in the evening it looks blue violet, not alive anymore. It runs so quickly out of someone who’s heavily injured, like out of broken glass”, the voice continued, and the Russian with its Irkutsk accent was every trap they had trained themselves not to respond to.

“We shot at a caravan transporting weapons. The people were dead at once, or they were quiet and waiting for death. But one wounded ass cried so much, it sounded like iron scratching iron. It’s bloody awful when animals are shot. But you don’t know that. You wouldn’t. You only have to kill people here, and you get to scrub it off with all that water. So much water. I had to kill a turtle once to drink its blood or I’d have gone mad with thirst.”

Philip still didn’t have a sight line. If he shot now, going by instinct and sound, he was reasonably sure he’d at least incapacitate the boy. But there _had_ to be a catch.

“You can talk back, you know. I have your positions already. Two. I’ve been waiting for you…Directorate S.”

* * *

 

_24 Hours earlier:_

I.

It was Oleg who discovered the truth about Yuri Victorovich Silfigarov. He'd liked him, socialized with him, and when he figured out Yuri Victorovich was the man the American press had dubbed "the Ax Killer", he threw up. Then he reported to Arkady.

This was a disaster on so many levels, and the two Americans Silfigarov had hacked to pieces, if it was truly him, were the least of it. Yuri Victorovich Silfigarov was a decorated war hero. That, in fact, was why he was currently employed at the Rezidentura. It was supposed to be both reward and propaganda. Silfigarov had served in Afghanistan, had saved his company, had insisted on going a second time despite being wounded, and had been transferred despite his protests. A textbook military hero, well deserving of all comforts a place at the Washington Rezidentura offered. Arkady wouldn't have been surprised if Oleg had felt vaguely guilty in his presence at first; hence the extraordinary efforts to befriend the taciturn Silfigarov, efforts that now had led Oleg to discover human body parts in Silfigarov's fridge.

Silfigarov had vanished; he'd last been seen the previous evening, which was why Oleg had shown up at his place unannounced. If the Americans were already suspicious of him, they'd have made noise by now, insisting that diplomatic immunity be dispensed with. But it might be simply a matter of time. And then the U.S. would have a field day. They'd claim Silfigarov was acting on orders, spreading terror in their capital; they'd come up with retaliations, and the disastrous escalating warfare of two years ago would be repeated. At best, even if Arkady denounced Silfigarov immediately to the American police, and even if they believed him, they'd milk every last drop of propaganda material out of this as far as the war in Afghanistan was concerned. If this was the behavior of a hero of the Soviet Republic, how was the rest of the army acting? And so forth. Even with censorship in place, news would spread, precisely because Silfigarov had been built up by the media at home as an example.

"Do you want me to contact the Americans, Arkady Ivanovich?" Oleg asked, still pale but not shaking, and focused, as Arkady noted with approval.

"No," Arkady said grimly.

Arkady contacted Gabriel instead.


	2. Chapter 2

II.

Elizabeth could tell Gabriel was in a bad mood, not least because instead of wining and dining them at his apartment, he chose to give them their instructions while walking through a shopping mall. Gabriel disliked malls, not for ideological reasons but for the noise and the smells of fast food, and he usually preferred to give them surroundings associated with comfort, family and trust. He always had. It was one reason why Elizabeth had avoided sharing meals with Claudia if at all possible. 

By the time Gabriel had finished briefing them, she understood his choice. In a mall, a part of their attention would always be focused on their surroundings, to make sure they weren't trailed. They could have only limited eye to eye contact. 

In other words, he didn't want to look her and Philip in the face when telling them they had to track down and kill yet another young man who'd only wanted to fight for the cause before becoming fatally lost. She remembered Jared's blood on her hands. She remembered Leanne's dead body in that hotel room, and that of Emmet, and of Jared's sister. She remembered the horror of realizing what Jared's words meant. 

If she'd known sooner, if only she'd known sooner. That was why Philip was wrong about Paige. Leave her surrounded by lies, with her drive for justice, with her passion, and Paige could fall into the same deadly confusion as Jared. 

This young man, though. He'd not been lied to. He must have snapped regardless, if what Gabriel said was true, but he'd been a soldier, a hero; surely, he deserved an attempt at help before he got an execution order? This wasn't sentimentality on Elizabeth's part, she told herself. It was a matter of honor, of duty rewarded. 

A soldier from Afghanistan. Philip had never told her more than the barest essentials of what Gabriel had said - what Gabriel had claimed - about the young man bearing his name. His other name. Mischa. He didn't have to. It was written all over his face when he listened to the news about Afghanistan on the radio. 

A son in Afghanistan, and Elizabeth, once he told her, had to make a split second decision whether to believe it or not. She had to. If it had been Claudia, she'd have been sure it was a lie, aimed at reaffirming Philip's loyalties, but she had to believe Gabriel, or their anchor of decades in enemy country was nothing but rust, and that couldn't be. Gabriel loved them. He'd been Philip's model of how to be a father. He might order them to their deaths if it served the cause, but he would not betray _that_. So there was a son, serving in Afghanistan, just like Yuri Victorovich Silfigarov had been.

"What if we capture him alive," Elizabeth said to Gabriel, carefully neutral, "incapacitate him? Surely you can get him out of the country."

Gabriel caught her deeper meaning at once. He turned away from the spectacle of cookie vendors and looked at Philip, not at her, when he replied. 

"I'm not sure someone who hacked two people to pieces and stored some of their body parts is in any sense retrievable." 

"Good to know," Philip said, with the half sarcastic, half sullen weariness he'd taken up more and more when talking to Gabriel. "Given that Elizabeth and I hacked a woman into pieces and stored her body rather recently." 

Gabriel made an exasperated noise, but he stopped short of rolling his eyes. It was eerily like how Philip himself had behaved when they had gotten the news about Henry's break-ins in the neighborhood last year. 

"If we can capture him alive," Elizabeth insisted, because she did notice Gabriel hadn't point blank said no, and he wouldn't have given them this opening if the orders couldn't be interpreted that way. 

He'd once told her some of the things he'd done in the Great Patriotic War as a young, starving adolescent, not as something to boast of but as a warning. So he also knew it was possible to come back from something like that. 

"We'll get him out then", Gabriel conceded. "But remember, you can't waste any time. Getting Silfigarov is only part of the job. You also need to provide the Americans with an alternative suspect." 

"And that's the main issue, isn't it," Philip commented. "We can't have a Russian serial killer because it's a publicity embarrassment ." 

Gabriel wasn't looking at him anymore. "I'll have a safe house ready," he said. "Contact me when you're done."


	3. Chapter 3

III. 

Finding a young Russian with a limited English vocabulary in the D.C. area and no more local knowledge than a few months at the Rezidentura could yield was never going to be that difficult. Taking a soldier trained as a sniper - and experienced in personal combat as well - prisoner, somewhat more so, but they knew the terrain whereas he didn't. 

"I can do it with Hans as back-up," Elizabeth argued. "You take care of the police." 

Philip gave her a look. She didn't want him to have to kill Silfigarov, should that become necessary. No matter their ongoing argument about Paige, or perhaps because of that. They had rubbed each other raw, these recent months, and sometimes she thought the blood in Philip was so close to the surface that it would break the skin at any moment. There was nothing good that could come out of Philip having to confront a young soldier from Afghanistan, nothing. 

"You're wrong," Philip said, as if reading her thoughts. Sometimes he could. At other times, he misunderstood her so completely as if they were still the strangers having to learn to live together in their strange house, in this strange, strange country. She supposed the reverse was true as well. 

"He's not Jared," Philip said, and wasn't that a case in point? 

"I know he's not," Elizabeth returned, feeling anger rising in her. 

"You won't be able to save him," Philip said. "Even if we do manage to take him alive. They'll simply kill him later, that's all. You know they will. So really, best to kill him right away. In combat." He laughed, utterly without humor; Philip, who saw a joke in almost everything. It was a trait that used to madden her, and sometimes still did. "Isn't that what a soldier would want? What _you_ would want?"

It was. Given the choice of dying a meaningless death somewhere in the dark, as someone's prisoner, or dying fighting for her life, Elizabeth would have chosen the later at any point. But she was furious now, furious that he had said _you_ , not _we_ , that he drew this distinction, and that he refused to accept what she wanted to give him, just as he had been angry she'd asked Gabriel to have his son transferred from Afghanistan, never mind that Gabriel hadn't been able to oblige anyway. 

"I would want to win," she said viciously. "To live. Because _I_ know I have something to live for. You used to know that, too." 

There it was, the accusation she had never voiced before. Even before the Jared revelation, before Paige divided them as their children used to unite them, she had felt the despair in him rise. It made her afraid. Elizabeth had never had much use for the American passion for psychobabble, and for psychology in general only inasmuch as it had been part of her training, to prepare her for assessing people. But she recognized self loathing when she saw it. Philip would never kill himself, as one of her assets had done, when she'd been younger and less able to judge the amount of pressure people could bear before snapping. He would never do that to Henry and Paige, never. But if he didn't want to live urgently enough anymore, he could get sloppy while fighting, and in their line of work, _that_ could get him killed. 

She had always believed he would survive her. He _had_ to survive her. She wouldn't allow anything else. 

Philip stopped the car he was driving at the next corner, turned, and stared at her. She refused to elaborate and returned his look. Suddenly, he leaned forward as if to kiss her, but left it at pressing his forehead against hers. 

"I still know it," he murmured. "But he doesn't. What does he have to live for, really?"

Her arms slipped around him. He was so familiar to hold; she could tell exactly how much weight he gained or lost at any given point. Sometimes Elizabeth thought this was the first thing she understood about being married: to know one body as well as her own, when her own was an instrument constantly used against strangers. 

Gabriel had given them Silfigarov's file, and so Elizabeth said: "He's got a mother. And part of his unit is still alive. Even if he doesn't believe in the cause anymore, they meant enough for him to go back once already. And I think you're wrong. About them wanting him dead no matter what. If that were true, Gabriel would have said so. He'd have ordered us to do it, no quarter given."

Philip was silent. Then he sighed. 

"Fine. We'll take him alive. But not you and Hans. You and me, and _then_ we'll deal with the cops."


	4. Chapter 4

IV. 

Tracing Silfigarov’s initial movements was as easy as predicted, far easier than the freelance German they’d had to track down for the KGB a while ago. It became somewhat more difficult when it turned out that after acquiring weapons, he’d been smart enough to change cars, or abandon his car and get some other form of transportation. Philip went through the file again. The Cyrillic letters wove their own sort of spell. 

Of course they’d seen Russian writing now and then during the last decades; but they had been as careful not to use it as they had maintained the discipline of not speaking the language. It had been a matter of survival at first; training themselves out of responding involuntarily, instinctively, to the sight or sound of Russian . _The oldest and easiest of traps_ , Gabriel used to say, shepherding them through the first few years. _Doesn’t mean you couldn’t still fall for it, no matter how experienced._  


Gabriel, whose own accent was stuck somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic and who could therefore only pose as a British expatriate, used Scrabble as a type of constant training. _Rewiring your brain to Latin letters and English words_ , he once said, and shared it with Philip originally for this reason; they had kept up the habit because it was fun. 

Sometimes, Philip wondered how Gabriel would respond if he acquired a set of Cyrillic letters and suggested Scrabble in Russian. After all, English had become instinctive to both of them a long time ago. It might actually be a challenge to which Gabriel would respond.

The notes about Silfigarov said he was from the Irkutsk Oblast, born amidst the hills and valleys of the Central Siberian Plateau. Philip thought about it, tried to think about it as Philip Jennings, and got nowhere, because connecting Philip Jennings to memories of the cold, dry air with not a trace of Virginian humidity in it meant connecting Philip Jennings to the other. Mischa, whom he tried to keep buried for such a long time now, but that was assuming there was something left to be buried, and sometimes he feared that if he tried to resurrect Mischa now, he’d discover there wasn’t. Or rather: Mischa had joined Clark and Scott and Ted and Jim and all the others, and Philip wasn’t more or less real than any of them. 

Elizabeth, as far as he could tell, did not have this problem with Nadezhda. Or rather: she had a sense of herself, be it as Elizabeth or Nadezhda, that was unshakable. It was one of the first things that had attracted him to her, and still did, though sometimes it made him furious as well.

Silfigarov’s sense of self was likely to be at the very least shaky. If he’d simply wanted to desert, to start a new life in the land of plenty, he’d have done it differently. He might not have any military secrets to sell, but the Americans would still have taken him in with gloating satisfaction. On the other hand, if the killings were simply due to him snapping, he’d still been able to keep his head enough to organize a disappearance. But was there any place he’d actually _want_ to go, on short notice? 

Philip thought about Afghanistan, the descriptions he’d heard, the dust, the lack of water. He thought about living in D.C. if you were openly Russian and identified as such as soon as you opened your mouth. The looks, the sound of strangers around you in their alien tongue. He thought of the Irkutsk Oblast, and then he had it. 

“Great Falls Park,” he said to Elizabeth. She knew at once what he meant. They had sent enough people there through the travel agency; a National Park, only 15 miles away from D.C. ; the Potomac River built up there in speed and force as it fell over a series of steep, ragged rocks. It was as close to the Irkutsk Oblast as you could get in this part of the country, and Silfigarov would be under the open sky there, not locked into a hostile city landscape. 

They looked at each other, and he saw the shadow of the boy in her eyes, Jared, who died in another National Park, spitting out blood and the truth about the murders he’d committed. 

Emmet’s last moments in life must have been hell: knowing his son killed him, killed their entire family. 

“I’ll tell Audrey we need her to look after Henry and Paige,” Elizabeth said. 

Paige would never know what it was like to kill. Nor would Henry, hero worship of Stan not withstanding. Elizabeth should really know Philip would never allow himself to die before ensuring this. But then, Elizabeth had allowed herself to be seduced by the chance to share something of her complete self with their daughter. Maybe it was a good thing any sense of completeness had long since slipped away from Philip, or he might have fallen prey to the same delusion.

The young man currently in Afghanistan bearing the name of Mischa-that-used-to-be had to be an expert killer by now. Sometimes Philip looked at Henry and saw a resemblance to the black and white photograph Irina had shown him. At other times, he was sure the photograph didn’t look like Henry at all, or like Irina, for that matter. That it showed an utter stranger he would never recognize. 

But he was always sure it showed Mischa.


	5. Chapter 5

V. 

In retrospect, it was obvious Silfigarov had left a trail for them. He’d kept away from the scenic spots so popular that they had visitors even on this wet, cold day, but he’d taken the trouble to have a brief, pointless exchange with a Ranger who could afterwards report he’d talked to someone with a Russian accent. They finally tracked him down not far from Cow Hoof Rock. He noticed their approach, which was understandable, given his training. 

He also immediately identified what they were, which was not. According to his file, Silfigarov hadn’t been anywhere near the level of clearance that would be required to know the identities of Directorate S agents. Had the Rezidentura truly become that careless with their lives? 

“I have a joke for you, Directorate S,” the young man said. “Will you still get it, I wonder? After all these years? You should. You really should.”

“At Kabul Transition camp, the dragon Gorynych, Koschei the Immortal and the witch Baba Yaga meet. All want to help defending the Revolution. Two years later, they meet again. The dragon Gorynych only has one of his heads left, the others he lost to decapitation. Koschei the Immortal is only still alive because he’s immortal, but he looks like shit. Only Baba Yaga is fine, full of energy, and she’d dressed up in jeans, stone washed jeans, no less. ‘I’m staying for a third year,’ she says. ‘Are you nuts, Baba Yaga?’ ‘Why? In the USSR, I’m Baba Yaga, but here, I’m the Beautiful Vassilja.’” 

All the babble about blood had gone past Philip, unable to penetrate the walls with which he shielded himself, but this slipped in, as if tickling long dormant nerve ends. He recognized both the insult and the humor. But Silfigarov was wrong if he thought this would be incomprehensible to an American. Stan would get it, Philip thought, and pushed the idle thought out of his head, because apparently Elizabeth had just decided that enough was enough.

She didn’t reply in Russian. She spoke English, which Philip was absurdly glad for, because he treasured the sound of her voice speaking Russian as something almost unbearably intimate, something that had taken her almost two decades to trust him with.   
“We won’t be your executioners,” she said, almost contemptuously. That Beautiful Vassilja crack evidently smarted. 

“Why, do I have to pay you first? You don’t need to live in the land of plenty to figure out trade, you know. Everything’s for sale in Afghanistan, too. Some guys from my unit sold rounds of cartridges because they didn’t have anything else to sell, but hey, at least they cooked them first, for two hours, before they sold them. You can’t kill anyone with a bullet like that. It blubbers in the barrel of your gun. And when they ran out of ammo, they sold knives from the canteens. You can’t cook _those_.”

Philip tried to filter out the words, just focus on the sound, to get closer, now that Silfigarov was focused on Elizabeth. But the words painted images before he could render them into meaningless sound. The reports on Afghanistan from the BBC were bad, and he listened to them because they had less reason to lie than either the Americans or the Centre. But they were still reports rendered in safe, journalistic terms. 

The Afghans he’d killed after posing as an American arms dealer had gifted him with a knife used against Russians first. Suddenly, he wondered whether it had come from a Russian canteen, too. 

“You don’t want us to kill you,” Elizabeth said. Her tone had changed. Now it was the persuading, reasonable tone she’d used with Paige when the biggest decision Paige ever had to face was whether to do her homework or not. “You want us to go help you go back to your unit. Like you went back for them before.”

Silfigarov didn’t reply at first. Then he said, still in Russian: “I don’t think I have enough English to understand you.”

He was in Philip’s line of sight now, and Philip didn’t hesitate. He shot, and Silfigarov’s right hand, holding the trigger of his own gun, jerked away, clean shot through. 

Blue and violet against a rock. Silfigarov had been right about the color of blood in the evening. Philip jumped forward and pinned his arms down before Silfigarov could go for the knife with his left hand. 

“Are you nuts, Baba Yaga?” the young man whispered. “That should have been a killing shot.”


	6. Chapter 6

VI. 

Stories of the Great Patriotic War had always been inspiring to Elizabeth. Inspiring, and guilt-inducing, as soon as she understood that her father had not been a hero but a deserter, and they were never, ever, to talk about it. When life seemed particularly difficult, she still went back to these stories in her head: both the ones about heroism through the horror, of the soldiers saving the mother country from the Nazis, and the secret shame that drove her to atone for it. Zhukov had once told her she’d been chosen for her assignment because they’d known she would never surrender, never.

This was the most basic truth she held on to, hard as it was at times. She would be worthy of all the sacrifices that had been committed during the horror that had come before. Elizabeth never lost the respect Nadezhda felt for the soldiers who fought in the open, even while taking pride in being a good soldier fighting in the dark. 

Silfigarov disturbed her on a level she hadn’t expected. Not because he was a self-evident mess, both mentally and physically, though Philip did his best to staunch the bleeding on Silfigarov’s hand after they’d packed him into the jeep they’d get rid off as soon as they’d brought him to the safehouse. That, she _had_ expected. No, it was the stories about corruption he told, relentlessly in Russian while she clung to English even in her thoughts, because to think in Russian about what he said would mean to acknowledge the truth of it.

“Will they give me a zincy coffin if they send me home? They only use zinc now for coffins in Afghanistan. At first I thought because of the shot faces, so the mothers wouldn’t have to see them like they would in the old coffins, the one with windows. And then I figured it out. It’s because of the drugs. They use the coffins to get them out of Afghanistan. Sometimes they don’t even bother with the bodies anymore, they just burn them and fill the coffins with heroin.”

“If something like this is going on, why didn’t you report it?” Elizabeth bit out, trying to focus on her driving, but the voice from the backseat was impossible to ignore for her. He just laughed. 

She didn’t understand, and not because she was some naïve ignorant of the possibility of corruption even in the best army, as he seemed to believe. But they’d all been taught to supervise each other for this very reason, from school onwards. To avoid corruption, any type of corruption. _You think it would be betrayal of your friends to report if they say or do something wrong, but it won’t be. It will help them, save them_ was how her teacher had put it. 

For a moment, she felt Timoshev’s hand on her mouth and heard his voice, years later, saying they’d been given access to the cadets as a perk. Which had to be a lie. Why hadn’t she reported _him_ back then, though? Because it had been too shameful, Elizabeth thought. She was being trained as a warrior. She should have fought him off successfully. 

Surely it hadn’t been because she’d known he was acting with everyone’s consent. 

“What will your mother say when you come back in a coffin, Yuri Victorovich?” Elizabeth asked, taking the offensive. “Did she raise you to be a coward who makes others kill him because he can’t face the consequences of what he did?”

She couldn’t help her voice pronouncing his name, Yuri Victorovich, the correct way, despite clinging to her American voice for the rest of it. 

“But she’s not my mother anymore,” Silfigarov replied. “Yuri Victorovich came never back from Afghanistan. Just a Zinc man did, along with the others. Filled with garbage, just like the others. If you cared about my mother, you’d have shot me. Then she’d get her hero son back. But you’ve become soft here.”

Philip made a disbelieving noise, something between a snort and an impatient exhalation. 

“You’re a child,” he said. She could see his point. That was the most primitive version of a dare from a supposedly trained adult she’d ever encountered.

“Then be my parents,” Silfigarov said in English, and Elizabeth froze. 

“What?” Philip asked tonelessly. 

“The Revolution eats its children,” Silfigarov murmured. “Who is the Revolution, if not you, Directorate S?”

Elizabeth was as familiar with the rhythm of Philip’s breath as she was with her own; otherwise, she never would have noticed that it changed, the way it did when he worried. 

“Who told you about us?” Philip demanded.

“Wouldn’t you like to know. Maybe I’ll tell you with my final breath. When you take it from me, _Batya_. Or you, _Mama_.” 

She knew exactly what he was doing. If he could give them the impression he knew their identities, they couldn’t risk leaving him alive. But she could see through the ruse. The Rezidentura would never have read someone like him into the Directorate S program. They wouldn’t have risked hers and Philip’s lives like that.

“You figured out we were Directorate S because the Rezidentura wouldn’t have sent anyone else after you on such short notice,” Elizabeth said sharply. “Beyond that, you haven’t the slightest idea who we are.” 

“I know you’re parents,” he said, almost gleefully. Still an educated guess, she thought. It had to be. 

“And you’re not our son,” Philip said, and didn’t sound like Philip at all, in any mood. It took Elizabeth a disoriented, disturbed heartbeat to realize this was because Philip had replied in Russian. 

“How would you know, _Batya_? Seriously. I have no idea whether there are few little bastards running around in Afghanistan. Or wait, I do. They hate us there. They hate us so much. We’ve given them farm tractors and medicine, they give us hate. No, I haven’t fucked any Afghan woman, but here, sure. And they don’t even pay me for it. You get paid for it, don’t you? Or is _Mama_ here the only one who has to fuck Americans for the Revolution?”

“You wanted to make a difference,” Elizabeth said, resorting to all the things she’d been planning to say because if she actually replied to all these childish provocations, she’d have lost for sure. “That’s why you enlisted. And then you got lost. We understand that. But you have to remember, you have to remember why you signed up, why you went back to your unit, and...”

“I signed up because they told us we’d go to Mongolia,” he said. “Not Afghanistan. And the first thing my unit did when I came back was robbing me of everything I had from back home, including my shirt, so they could trade it away. Afghanistan is turning us all into capitalists. Just like this place. Or do you really think you’re still a Socialist, with your fine clothes and your cars and all that rich food in your belly… Baby Yaga?”

Against her will, she was reminded of Philip trying to get her to admit she liked it here. Of saying how this place did not turn out socialists. But he was wrong. They were both wrong. She hadn’t surrendered. In anything. 

“What _do_ you want?” Philip asked suddenly. “And don’t tell me it’s just death. You could have robbed a department store and gotten the Americans to shoot you in two seconds, if you’re that opposed to suicide. You didn’t have to kill those two people before that, either.”

Silence fell between them when Silfigarov didn’t reply. She stared ahead on the road and tried not to think of anything else. The silence grew clinging, sticky, stuck in her throat like all that American maple syrup she could never get used to. 

“I want to know why,” Yuri Viktorovich Silfigarov said at last, so softly she almost could not understand him. “Why my comrades died, why the first dead body I saw in Afghanistan was that of a boy next to a dead camel, with both their bellies ripped open. What does that have to do with our international duty? With securing southern borders? Nothing. But they won’t ever tell us anything beyond propaganda. They even made me into propaganda. But I thought: I have to show them what Afghanistan is really like. Become the worst of it, force them to see its face. They’d have to say something _then_. And maybe, just maybe, the last of my unit will be allowed to go home.”


	7. Epilogue

VII.

Gabriel was waiting for them in the safe house. He didn’t look surprised when they arrived alone. But he did look angry.

“A suicide with a full signed confession next to him?” he asked them. “Really?”

“I take it’s been reported on the police radio,” Philip said stonily. “The cops were already there when we had tracked him down. We could have taken them out, of course, but that would have created an even greater mess.”

“And the reason why he went to Great Falls instead of writing his confession and killing himself in D.C. was…?” Gabriel demanded, addressing not Philip anymore but Elizabeth. She refused to blink.

“We wouldn’t know. Given we arrived too late. But I think – I think it must have reminded him of home.”

Gabriel had been the one who had turned them from already good to truly excellent liars. One of his regular exercises had been to make them tell him some truths and lies, all mixed up. It had taken Philip a year to reach the point where Gabriel couldn’t pin point every lie anymore; Elizabeth, to her eternal annoyance, had needed almost two.

They hadn’t played that game with him for years.

“Well,” Gabriel said, “Arkady won’t be happy. Given the US media is going to make this about the war, and the Centre will blame him for not keeping a war hero in better shape. And in the end, they’ll say US corruption and drugs were to blame. That they changed him. Because that’s what the West does.”

* * *

 

_**Epilogue** _

_4 hours earlier:_

Philip had to get rid of all the first aid at Silfigarov’s hand again, and hold it still while Elizabeth got the bullet out and replaced it with one that would have been shot at closer range. Silfigarov grunted a few times; once, he cried out. Mostly, he babbled, feverishly.

“Here’s another joke for you,” he said, in between spitting and cursing. “So a speculator arrives in Afghanistan. The first thing he wants to know is how much a captured Dushman is worth. ‘Eight cheques’, they tell him. Two days later there’s a cloud of dust in front of the camp. The speculator has dragged two hundred prisoners there. A buddy of his asks him: ‘Give me one of them. I’ll give you seven cheques.’ ‘Listen, mate,’ the speculator replies, ‘I’ve just bought them for nine.’”

The new bullet was in. Tears running down his face, Silfigarov said: “Come on, that was funny.”

“You really need to work on that sense of humor,” Philip returned. Silfigarov supposedly had written his confession with this hand, since nobody would buy a type written one ; the story would be that he’d tried to shoot himself afterwards, misfired, and then went into a bathtub to open his veins. It was clumsy, but the best that could be done under the circumstances.

There was also the part where Silfigarov could still change his mind. Bleeding out in hot water wasn’t painful, and it took a while. Philip didn’t know what he hoped for, that Silfigarov would stick with his resolution or that he would want to live after all. He truly didn’t know what he wanted. But he could guess what Elizabeth preferred. Dying in a mad gamble to save your comrades, to expose corruption, that was something she could respect, and it would allow her to bury the rest of what Silfigarov had said in the corner of her mind where she kept things like her anger at the Center testing them via Claudia, or the ways in which they had been trained.

They remained with Silfigarov, till the end. At one point, he got them to sing with him. Philip Jennings loved playing karaoke with Henry, but Philip Jennings had no place here, in this room, and so the sounds came out of use and out of fashion, while Elizabeth just hummed.

“I’m sorry,” Silfigarov whispered. For Afghanistan, for the two dead men in D.C., Philip thought, but then Silfigarov continued: “I think I can go home now. But you never will.”

Elizabeth’s hand on Philip’s shoulder tightened. But neither of them protested, and then even the whispered sound of Russian was gone.


End file.
